Azure native Firewall Service tags filtering: Service tags confines a group of IP address prefixes to specific services like Azure Key Vault, SQL Azure, and Azure Service Bus. These service tags can be used in destination filed in network rules. A few more tags include AzureConnectors, AzureCosmosDB, MicrosoftContainerRegistry, and AppService. A whole list of tags along with their details is available on Microsoft Docs.

Digital Platforms

Digital Ecosystems rapidly became a multi-billion dollar industry. Last year Hyperscalers invested over $120 billion in Digital Ecosystem platforms. Disruptive innovations provide simpler or more elegant solutions to existing problems, enabled by new technology and often at a lower cost. Many businesses recognizes the limitations of their existing platform while exploring opportunities that tap into emerging technologies and new delivery models who will have the best chance of thriving in the fast-approaching disruptive future. Collaborative Ecosystems should exponentially elevate the value it creates and deliver. They will revolutionize business for some time to come.

Hyperscalers

Hyperscalers such as Apple, Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and others are gearing up for battle. Misleading information is convincing businesses to migrate to these platforms without understanding the long-term impact and liabilities. Moreover, entire industries are making decisions based on studies and reports, influenced by the very same Hyperscalers. Many businesses think if they do not keep up they will eventually fail.

Client Operating System

Dominating Digital Ecosystems will require an even more dominating end-user Operating System. The end game is controlling the entire value chain in addition to recurrent subscription lock-in, and preventing you the customer from ever migrating. In other words, easy to get in but difficult to get out.

Enterprise Migration

It should not be a surprise that medium to large size Enterprises are having great difficulties adapting to Digital Ecosystems. Migration could be risky, complicated and expensive or just simply impossible. There are no standards or unification between competitive Digital Ecosystem platforms. Migrating from a Digital Ecosystem might not be possible without starting over again and paying a hefty fine.

Channel Partners

I have witnessed the destruction of privacy and the disruptive (dead-end) transition of the hosting industry. Next in line are Channel Partners, ISV’s and OEM’s. Overall, I am unpleasantly surprised businesses and governments ignore the risks by surrendering sensitive data to these Hyperscalers. It is time for new legislation to reveal the true intentions of those trying to dominate our digital world. If you think they are on your side think again!

Too Big to Fail

Eventually Hyperscalers will become too big to fail. If governments fail to regulate them, it will expose us to a global economic and systemic meltdown.

What led to today’s success will ultimately lead to tomorrow’s failure

Microsoft has now introduced more flexibility with Azure: open source systems are now supported. Partners have broader choices in the cloud which enable them for better investment opportunities. IaaS is now available on Linux, PHP web application platform and not to forget Java!

Not only this commitment with open source platforms extent options for providers, it also opens doors for a diverse team of developers to engage with Microsoft products and platform. They can complement their development works with Azure and get more value out of Microsoft products. Azure Active Directory can be used to augment open source apps with identity management and access management. Moreover SharePoint sites can be connected to PHP portals. Hence the apps ecosystem will continue to evolve with this step of Microsoft making “open source” a part of Microsoft everyday cloud innovation approach.

Cloud Infrastructure as a Service is a fast-growing market and is expected to reach up to 25% of total Infrastructure outsourcing market by 2020. IaaS has promoted promoting digital operation in an innovative manner along with enabling digital business. This has contributed to the growing popularity of IaaS.

It has been seen that, IaaS providers continue to offer legacy services which include simple servers, network resources and storage space, hence a simple infrastructure. These services will not be sufficient for the upcoming demands of digital business. In order to promote customers digital journey demands, Infrastructure providers need to offer digital infrastructure platform which offers a range of higher level services exposed via APIs, hence introducing a platform which customers can utilize for development of apps and services that provide value to business initiatives.

Hence provision of resources needs to be shifted from simple (storage, server, and network) to complex (Infrastructure resources) to find growth opportunities for both customers and Infrastructure providers.

The concept of “born-in-the-cloud” is seldom confused with “cloud-enabled” or “cloud-native”. However, there is a significant deference between these terms.

A solution that was “born in the cloud” means a solution that is exclusively meant to be delivered by the cloud and does not involve any legacy systems. The solutions that are cloud-enabled are the solutions that were originally designed for a traditional datacenter and then eventually plunked into the cloud. this is originally a legacy product. They are single-tenant and difficult to scale.

In case of cloud native systems, they are built form ground up approach using micro-services. They are multi-tenant and are easily scalable. Hence the concepts of “born-in-the-cloud” and “cloud-native” are close enough but have a huge difference with “cloud-enabled” solution.

Companies prefer to adopt cloud-native solutions. With cloud-native solutions, there is no hassle of the Infrastructure upon it is delivered and built. Many vendors are now trying to offer cloud-enabled version of their products.

The concept of ‘Multi-clouds’ revolves around private clouds, hosted cloud environments and even on-premises data centers. A lot of organizations, whose major domain is deployment and management, opt for this approach. Here are three basic steps to get hand on transition to a multi-cloud strategy:

Be more accessible to business users and know where your resources are located.

Be focused with business services and know the relationship between business process and workload

Use a cloud management platform and create an initial multi-cloud governance system.

Taking a multi-cloud approach makes the IT infrastructure more flexible. However, there is not a single solution fits all, rather every company shall have their own multi-cloud roadmap that makes the transition phase easier for the organization. A decent Cloud management platform enables end-to-end visibility across all the Cloud resources. It also simplifies much business complexity and integration challenges while moving towards multi-cloud.

Since the Cloud has prevailed in almost all aspects of business, it is important to keep a check on the latest trends in order to stay competitive in the market.

• Internet of Everything (IoE)
After IoT (Internet of Things), the term IoE (Internet of Everything) will soon prevail with Artificial Intelligence being in the front of cloud. This means, devices can be interacted in an intelligent manner, much like human to human interaction.

• Rise of 5G
With more data requirements, there will be better internet quality and 5G to support the internet needs. Highly responsive, fast loading apps and services will require better quality networks.

• Security concerns
Security has always been a topic of concern with upcoming technology and cloud is no exception. There will be a greater need for enhanced security.

Software Defined Network (SDN)

Hyper-V Network virtualization provides a capability, in which multiple virtual networks (with overlapping IP addresses) run on the same physical network infrastructure and each virtual network operates and isolated from each other.

Microsoft Hyper-V Network Virtualization virtualizes the VM networks by connecting each VM IP address (CA) with a corresponding physical IP address (PA) used on the actual packets on the wire.
Each VM packet is transformed (rewritten/encapsulated) from a CA packet to PA packet before the packet is actually transmitted onto the physical network, and is transformed back with matching rules from PA packet to CA packet before the packet is sent back to the destination virtual machine.

SDN/Network virtualization module operates on the packets based on the virtualization policy rules provisioned from management servers such as (SCVMM) OR Using PowerShell Scripts.

Microsoft Inspire 2018 (worldwide partner conference)

The event where the world meets to transform business is headed to Las Vegas, Nevada July 15-19 2018.

Inspire will offers a week packed full of networking, learning and collaboration for current Microsoft partners, as well as those interested in building a partnership with the tech giant. At Microsoft Inspire, You’ll hear the latest insights from top Microsoft leaders, meet fellow Microsoft partners, and get plenty of opportunities for face-to-face conversations with industry’s trendsetters.

There’s no other event that offers the same quality of Microsoft partner experience that Microsoft Inspire does.

covering skill gap: Recruiting, training, motivating and retaining talent can all present problems to achieving the vision of a fully resourced tech support/help desk team with all the right hard and soft skills.

Optimizing support processes: Ensuring the right balance between customer preference, effectiveness and efficiency.

Enhancing self-service: Empowering end-users to resolve their own problems reduces demand on the tech support/help desk team but also gives a growing number of end-users what they want. A potential win-win scenario.

MachPanel Cloud Hosting Control Panel

Designed & optimized to provide the perfect response for those seeking high performance and maximum practicality. It help enterprises manage cloud deployments more efficiently, with less manual effort. Self-service capabilities are important to unlocking the promise of cloud computing.

About MachSol

MachSol is a technology company. The Company develops and supports a range of software products and services. The Company’s segments include Business Processes, Intelligent Cloud and More Personal Computing. The Company’s products include Cloud (hosting) automation control panel; server applications; business solution applications.